EDIT:
The wing surface (that kite he mentions sacrificing) is from one of these ( http://ride.slingshotsports.com/2012-Fuel# ) which is intended for exactly this sort of thing--supporting a human in flight.
It's not the power output of the motors I was questioning, but the overall strength of the system. A back of the envelope calculation (from a commentator at Wired) suggests we're seeing a lever ratio of around 30:1; simplifying greatly that implies each side is moving a 1.5 ton weight back and forth multiple times per second. This is challenging for far more than the motor.
Mind you, 2000w does sound low. The Festo SmartBird weighs less than 500g, and uses around 25w to fly. If you scale it up linearly, that says 2000w would be enough for 40kg, which is less than half what we need. But the Festo SmartBird is a vastly more sophisticated design, and among other things actually flaps its wings in a way which generates lift, unlike this guys design. (Very useful, that.) It's going to be much more efficient than this wing design, so we're actually looking at a much larger power deficit.
Incidentally, the Festo SmartBird is a pretty amazing project; anyone who found this wing design interesting would probably be interested in it. Check out this writeup with a brief video of the bird in flight[1] or this much longer video of the design process[2].
The second link, in particular, underscores just how impossible the idea of some guy on his own throwing together some wings and managing to fly is. Bird flight is an amazingly hard problem to solve, even for a bird sized model.
Finally someone pulled out meaningful fact about flying.
How funny people keep saying about video without taking into account any engineering or physical requirements to make this real.
More usefully, I don't mind if this turns out to be a fake--but this off-the-cuff "no it is not possible ever" is so narrowminded when not combined with credible facts and analysis.
I agree. It is good to be skeptical - as they say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Experts are trained to be skeptical. I am not saying that video may not be a fake but I am also equally skeptical about all the expert opinion on the impossibility of it all. And that is because experts have a long tradition of often being dead wrong about what is possible. Lord Kelvin - who was England's top scientist and President of the Royal Society flatly stated in 1895 that "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" - just a decade before he was proven wrong.
There are many more similar examples in the history of progress. It is a good thing inventors also have a long tradition - of ignoring experts and just trying to achieve what has been claimed as impossible.
That approximate wing loading calculation is assuming there is sufficient force to fully load the wing. He's not going to get that load on the wing by jogging a few feet and flapping those things at 1hz.
EDIT: The wing surface (that kite he mentions sacrificing) is from one of these ( http://ride.slingshotsports.com/2012-Fuel# ) which is intended for exactly this sort of thing--supporting a human in flight.
Note that in the design blog the motors are being run through a 25:1 planetary gear. The family of motors in question can put out in excess of 2kw ( http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__17986__Turnigy_Ro... or http://hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProdu... ). So, no, the power plant is quite capable.